


The lives and times of everyone she's ever known

by Efervescent



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: Gen, WB: Shikako's References To Media/Pop Culture From Her Past Life - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 18:10:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18783460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Efervescent/pseuds/Efervescent
Summary: Kankuro embarks on a journey to discover the real inspiration behind Shikako's stories.





	The lives and times of everyone she's ever known

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AislingRoisin (JayBird345)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayBird345/gifts).



Sparky is by far one of the best sources of fiction to go around, and that estimate is taking into account the myths and legends of Suna, most books he’s read, his family’s library and the oral tradition of the puppeteer corps. It’s an unlikely ranking, but it’s never more obvious than after one of her stories how most media falls into well-used patterns. It makes even new material seem tired-a creative break is well overdue but war will not allow for it. There's too much poverty, too many illiterate people for a good base of writers out of which a small percentage to stand out, too few resources to go around for many people to afford the time and effort you need to invest in making a book, too much censorship to make the effort worthwhile or even to allow what already exists to get any widespread circulation.

 

The lack of the typical internal structure doesn’t take away from Shikako’s stories. She’s a captivating storyteller, if obviously not a very experienced one: her turn of phrase verges into outright strange at times and there are obvious details and symbols that appear which would definitely enhance meaning if only she ever explained them-it’s galling, to know that he’s missing out on Easter eggs just because they have different cultural backgrounds. But the experience is worth more than just words that could have been read off a page, it’s in the storyteller as well. It’s in the rhythm and flow of her words, in the flicker of her shadow as twists and turns are revealed even when she’s not using it as a medium. It’s in the depth of her dark, dark eyes, reflecting the campfire and leaving him feeling oddly raw and exposed, all the better for the emotional impact of the tale to land a hit. With the long flickering shades cast by the fire spilling over her pale skin like ink, her hair fading into the night, her entire being defined in the stark contrast of light and shadow, she captures his attention unlike anything else, sneaks away bits of his focus until there’s only her and the story. The danger comes when the story ends but her spell is not quite broken, and he’s left with her on his mind. Because then his senses reach out to grasp her presence, his eyes can’t help but track her and it makes him hyperaware of everything she does.

 

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He knows he may have a bias, but he’s a big enough nerd(there’s no shame in it if you own up to it, no matter what Temari may try to imply) to trust that it doesn’t color his appreciation of the actual content of the story. As out of place as some of the scenarios she describes might seem, they remain internally consistent and keep a good pace action-wise. It only makes him more curious as to the source.

 

Because her choice of topic and style varies wildly, he’s inclined to believe her when she says that they are not her creations, not conceptually. This raises the question of where she could be getting it from, and he’s thought of and dismissed quite a few answers. The Konoha public library, like the library of any hidden village, barely deserves the name. Fire country culture is rich, having been witness to hundreds of nomadic clans crossing it over time, each leaving behind something of themselves, but rarely are the myths and legends that survive based on stories as intricate as hers: traditional secondary characters are barely worth the mention and only ever there to further the plot, but she brings in secondary plots and allows for character development. Her clan library and her own family’s oral tradition would be next up. Except, he can do a bit of digging of his own: clan libraries are very focused on utility. The reason is basically that the mass production and commercialisation of books only became possible after the establishment of the hidden villages. Prior to that, you had the instruments to make a book, if you desired; hell, if you tried hard enough you could even find a printing press, but making high-quality long-lasting paper in big quantities was an undertaking not many found the motivation to even begin. There is still fiction from ages long past, just…very little of it. Having a trove of such stories would be better served shared with the world, and since the military value of most of it is null, he doesn’t think any clan would deny their cultural significance. Their culture is one that values tradition highly, and there is a special kind of pleasure in knowing that you still have what your kind has toiled over centuries ago-it’s only perhaps outmatched by the warm glow of satisfaction in knowing something of you will remain and leave a mark long after you’re gone. It’s a deep and abiding sort of hurt, that one of the things persistent conflict has stolen from everyone is some of their history, the stories of their ancestors and the hard-earned wisdom. History is doomed to repeat itself, and their ignorance will doom them in turn.

 

So he’d checked. Suna offered more leave than other villages, since there had been much fewer missions to go around, especially in recent years, but there was no mandate on how you could spend your days off. He’d gotten two weeks off and paid the fire nation capital a visit, ready to trace back her stories to a hopefully pubic resource. No luck there, though he had gotten more material and inspiration than he would have thought, while also thoroughly blowing to dust the folklore theory.  
Familial oral tradition was the next thing that came up on his list, but Sparky was much too free with her stories. Having a series of legends preserved and passed on through generations was special: it was a not-quite-secret, something that only a very select group of people got to hear and that made you party to this hidden society, tying you closer to your family line through unique shared experiences. It wasn’t forbidden to pass such things on, but it would never be done in such a throwaway manner, just for entertainment. More damning still was that even her brother hadn’t heard some of them-and something passed only from mothers to daughters would only make it a more exclusive, more intimate ritual.

 

He was kind of running out of ideas when he thought to have a look in a Konoha book shop. He got a great selection of new stuff-different regulations for censorship plus more local writers- and no confirmation for this new-and honestly pretty weak-theory. The most maddening thing was that he couldn’t really strike any on the items from his list for certain. Shikako refused to give definitive answers. For all he knew there was that one Nara uncle that travelled the world and told her stories he had imagined along the way, helped by local legend and personal mishaps, whenever he came back. Or that one Nara auntie that had taken the low price and high availability of good paper to mean that she should write down every story passed through her, and the priceless anthology was languishing on a shelf somewhere in the Nara clan library. Or any combination of random happenstance that would allow her and only her access to a bounty of unique and high-quality fiction.

 

The frustration gets to him every time he allows himself to think on the subject, which only makes Kankuro feel like more of a moron once he discovers the truth. It’s entirely through happenstance and it’s galling to know that he might never have figured it out if he hadn’t been at the exact right place at the exact right time. Or at any time really, if he’d managed to ever get his head out of his ass. But his efforts have little to do with the discovery: he owes it all to the power of coincidence. He’s enjoying the last respite he’s going to get before running for hours: it’ll be best to get the last leg of his trip home over with in one sweep, so he’s getting a well-earned breakfast in a little tavern at the edge of Fire Country. He’d go for a rations bar, normally: small town food is rarely worth the expense, but he knows the place, and he’s got the time and money to indulge in their truly glorious stew-mystery meat as it may be, it fills you up like nothing else.

 

He’s running solo, so he just listens to the other patrons, hoping something interesting will come up. Luckily, what sounds like a pretty great dramatic retelling has already started at one of the corner tables. He missed the start, but it’s referenced enough that he can get the gist of it: a womanizer killing a noblewoman’s father after an attempt at seduction gone wrong, her fiancé being sworn to avenge it, being recognized by a former flame but still attempting to seduce a bride right before her wedding shortly after. Things are getting good when the coin drops. He…knows how the story will end. Because it’s not a month ago that he heard it told by none other than Nara Shikako. The introduction of the supernatural element is the one that really pounds it in: the story never hinted at anything until it appears out of the blue, and it’s an element distinct enough that he can be sure it’s not a coincidence, not when they assume a similar moralizing role: Shikako’s story had a statue, this one has a ghost, but the specifics of the character are insignificant in the face of the identical meaning they carry.

 

The interesting part is the names. Because Sparky’s protagonist was named Donhuan and the action was taking place in some random village, but the guy in the corner is telling the story of Sarutobi Fumie, which is taking place in the village of Suwa-a place he’s never heard of, but still a pretty concrete starting point. The name Sarutobi could be a coincidence, but it’s not. It was definitely worth delaying his journey (ordering dessert and then a drink to justify his occupying a table-he may be otherwise preoccupied, but he's still a shinobi), he thinks as he hears the ending of the story and-even better- the origin. Because, if the man in the corner is to be believed, Suwa was a real place. A real place, razed to the ground in the grief of Sarutobi Sasuke at the death of his beloved younger brother, Fumie, who had too weak a constitution to become a shinobi and by the going of the story was an all-round pretty awful person, but still remained the apple of his legendary brother’s eye.(1)

 

His thoughts are churning the whole way back. He falls straight to sleep as soon as he arrives, of course-curiosity doesn’t really compete with mission exhaustion, but over the next week he’s able to confirm the existence and subsequent sudden destruction of Suwa. Which happened to be situated at the edge of former Sarutobi clan territories just prior to the formation of Konoha. And burned down the same year as Sarutobi Fumie died.

 

It’s…revelatory. Shikako doesn’t take ownership of the stories, because she doesn’t feel like they’re hers. Because they’re not. She’s taking the lives and adventures of others and wrapping them up in ambiguity or a differing context and crafting them into a narrative. The exact same thing he does often enough, except he has carefully thought out manuscripts and dramatic retellings put to paper on the shelves of his room-one day, he’ll have them typed up and added to the clan library. She’d even said once that life doesn’t make narrative sense and things don’t really happen for a reason(2), a weird enough throw-away line even in context, but he knows how with some careful curating a lot of urban legends could become stories. Konoha had incorporated so many clans, she must be sitting of a small mountain of Clans Era drama, freely shared as that one thing the grandpa living across from you did in his youth, ready to be moulded into fiction.

 

It kind of annoys him that she hadn’t just told him plainly-he’d have loved to dig his creative claws into some of that ‘ancient’ history. Except, he realises with a jolt, there could be a very good reason not to share what she was doing. Sarutobi Fumie’s story had been decades old: everyone involved was long dead. There was no sensitive information that could be revealed by the incident (except maybe for Sarutobi Sasuke’s proficiency with fire jutsu, which was inheritable-and brought to even more infamy by his son, the Third Hokage). But if she was taking inspiration from other-more recent- events? It would be incredibly dangerous-except her audience was mostly civilian. And he himself hadn’t made the connection-he, who keeps a record of her tales, and occasionally asks around to see if anyone had gotten new ones on joint missions he hadn’t taken. It’s a thrill, to think that some of the things she has spoken of have actually happened, perhaps even to people in his acquaintance.

 

It’s also chilling to the bone, if he thinks about her propensity for overpowered (in his opinion) antagonists. Gods, demons, beings born with the beginning of time-conquered not by legendary heroes, but ordinary people. Defeated by cleverness, teamwork or sacrifice, rather than might. Some of it is stretching the truth. It’s easy to make an enemy into a dragon, anger and wisdom used only to destroy you, so much more powerful he becomes an unreachable goal-except he can’t be sure. He wouldn’t believe the truth of it if he hadn’t witnessed the emergence of the Garden with his own eyes. He’d thought that Nara Shikako was the sort of person that would be the subject of legends. He’s written some rather striking pieces himself, inspired (but only loosely, because he wouldn’t put to paper what really happened that day) by the event, but the notion that she’s writing her own stories, without anyone but him knowing (the truth muddled through with fiction and veiled by the secrecy of missions-hiding the occurrence of the original event) bears down on him with the delicious weight of a shared secret. If the number of tales she’s told means anything, though, the world really is much more rife with supernatural beings than he ever would have suspected and Konoha was already an old hand at keeping them at bay. Kind of explains why Sparky is constantly striving to improve, trying to make the most of every hour. He would too, if he had that kind of fire burning under his ass. Except, he realises with a special kind of horror, he also does. He just doesn’t get to see it coming.

 

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It’s almost unreal how much his perspective on diplomatic missions has changed within the last year. The reason for it is clear, though: the meaning of ‘diplomatic mission’ has shifted from spending weeks travelling at a snail’s pace through the desert in the company of whiny and condescending nobles, to joint missions with Konoha, which serve to strengthen international relations while also exposing him to the crazy that makes Konoha nin so entertaining.

 

There’s the occasional stick in the mud, but more often than not, Kankuro can get some enjoyment out of the mission. This time he doesn’t even have to try: he lucked out, and his teammate is none other than Nara Shikako, which bodes well for his amusement and ill for the possibility of the mission going wrong. They’re each in charge of their own little team of chuunin, but he doesn’t need to trouble himself with side characters when the lead is so readily available.

 

It's easy enough to cajole her into sharing a tale. Logs crackle as she weaves the story of a family whose members bore a recurring curse and who would wager their lives in a deadly board game against death for a chance to save them. Later that night, when camp has gone still and quiet, he wandered how many Nara had lost.(3)

 

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Between life-threatening training, gruelling missions and a good deal of indoctrination, ninja all too often forget that the primary purpose of their job is the same as that of any other occupation: to bring in income. Which usually means there are more protection missions than assassinations (there’s only so many who would pay to have the pests in their lives murdered, whereas most people value their own lives rather highly), but is also the reason all D-ranks are accepted. In this case, it’s the reason she’s spending three weeks in a little town right by the capital (only an hour away at ninja speed). Konoha needs funds more than it needs manpower, meaning that when a request for an individual to become a temporary consultant for the national theatre troupe (to be paid by the day) comes in, that individual has to go, special jounin or not.

 

It's not that Shikako doesn’t realise there’s an audience to her stories, but sometimes she tells them more for herself than for anyone listening. They’re a way to materialise some of what she lost, remake something what was once a source of delight for her into a narrative adapted to the world she finds herself in, build bridges across lives that have next to nothing in common except for her. But people listen and occasionally people enthusiastically retell her stories to their uncles who happen to be high-ranked nobles at the Fire daimyo’s court. Which somehow leads to the capitol theatre wanting to put up a play based on it.

 

The blathering about how she should be honoured to have this opportunity starts to get old by day two. She didn’t ask to be here, but apparently the Daimyo had requested to see a show based on Botan’s stories, and she, a peasant as she may be, remains the only source they have readily available whose version is not rife with narrative inconsistencies and a child’s excited additions. As a special treat for the court, she’s even going to be featured in the show for the first three performances: something for which apparently her meagre acting experience qualifies her.

 

Her own fault for choosing a story based around familial love and sacrifice, but where the usual fights are replaced by intellectual games, making it more relatable to the upper class. At least she’s having a rough enough time that nothing else might go wrong? Rehearsals are a special kind of hell already. Of course, the second that thought crosses her mind, she looks down to see the thin film of water that’s steadily spreading across the stage. And so it begins.

**Author's Note:**

> Imagine his conspiracy theories if she ever retold Dune.  
> An essential part in enjoying pretty much any sort of art is your willingness to engage with it. With most performances, this means a willing suspension of disbelief. It makes your brain take in info but not assess it till later, when you’ve stopped taking it in: it’s why you can get drawn into a story. It’s also one of the reasons we assume most stuff we’re told is true: we have to consciously consider how likely something is after we get served a narrative. On the one hand, Kankuro is a ninja. On the other, he has a deep and abiding love for the arts. He’d want to get the most impactful experience, so I’d think he would let himself get caught. Of course, once he’s let down a little of that wall of pure rationality and careful analysis that is generally needed to keep a ninja alive, the crush he definitely still hasn’t noticed starts coming through.  
> Shikako has definitely noticed the staring. Naturally, she assumes it has to do with pieces of information regarding her job performance that the rest of the Sand contingent doesn’t have access to and that merit constant supervision on the off-chance that they’ll be validated.  
> (1) Donhuan as in Don Juan, the mythical womanizer on which several pieces of literature are based. The plot is the start of Don Giovanni (it basically starts the same in both the Mozart opera and the Moliere play). Sarutobi Sasuke is actually the Third Hokage’s dad in cannon and so strong that Mikoto named her son after him in hopes he’d grow up as strong. His brother is my creation, but it just so happens that in this universe the brother complex is also passed on to his namesake.  
> (2) From Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, from the song ‘The end of the movie’  
> (3) Reference to Lord Loss: the story a family where everyone plays chess told from the perspective of their youngest son, who later finds out this is because occasionally a member turns up that is affected by lycanthropy-like an actual, unthinking beast-style curse. When that happens, they can make a wager against a demon to play chess for that person to be human again. Except Shikako wouldn’t say ‘a family where everyone plays this one board game you don’t know’. She’d say shogi or go, and Kankuro (after having researched them so much) would think it’s an obvious reference to the Nara clan.


End file.
